The Russian Revolution полностью

*This tactic has succeeded in confusing even some historians: since the Bolsheviks did not openly declare that they wanted power, it is argued, they did not want it. But in October 1917 they would also pretend to act under pressure from below although no such pressure existed. The duality of instruments used by the Bolsheviks and their emulators was first noted by Curzio Malaparte in his Coup d’Etat. A participant in Mussolini’s power seizure, Malaparte realized what most contemporaries and many historians have missed—namely, that the Bolshevik revolution and its successors operated on two distinct levels, the observable and the concealed, the latter of which delivered the death blow to the existing regime’s vital organs.

*Cf. Eric Hoffer: “Action is a unifier.… All mass movements avail themselves of mass action as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium”: The True Believer (New York, 1951), 117, 118–19.

*Ocherki istorii Leningradskoi organizatsii KPSS, I (Leningrad, 1962), 481. Bagdaev had in fact been charged by the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik Party with organizing the May 1 demonstration, which fell on April 18, the day the government’s declaration and note on war aims were delivered to Allied governments: Kudelli, Pervyi, 82.

*The American historian Alexander Rabinowitch, who adopts the Bolshevik thesis that the April demonstrations were a peaceful demonstration, avoids the problem by omitting in his citation of the above passage Lenin’s reference to “violent means”: Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), 45.

*W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, I (New York, 1935), 159. The First Peasants’ Congress, attended by over a thousand delegates, had in it twenty Bolsheviks: VI, No. 4 (1957), 26.

*The rivalry between trade unions and Factory Committees would recur twenty years later in the United States when plant-based unions, affiliated with the CIO, challenged the craft-oriented unions of the AFL. Here, as in Russia, the Communists favored the former.

*A set of documents, purporting to demonstrate direct German involvement in Russian events, 1914–1917, and known as the “Sisson Papers,” had surfaced in early 1918. They were published in the United States by the Committee on Public Information, War Information Series, No. 20 (October 1918), The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy. The German Government had at once proclaimed them a complete forgery (Z. A. B. Zeman, Germany, and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–1918, London, 1958, p. X.) See further George Kennan in The Journal of Modern History, XXVIII, No. 2, June 1956, 130–54. Their effect has been to discredit for many years the very notion of German financial and political support of Lenin’s party.

*Bernstein’s figure was confirmed by postwar researches in German Foreign Ministry Archives. Documents found there indicate that until January 31, 1918, the German government had allocated for “propaganda” in Russia 40 million deutsche marks. This sum was exhausted by June 1918, following which (July 1918) an additional 40 million marks were assigned for this purpose, although apparently only 10 million were spent, not all of them on the Bolsheviks. A German mark at the time bought four-fifths of a tsarist ruble and approximately two post-1917 rubles (so-called “Kerenki”). Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik, 1918 (Vienna-Munich, 1966) 213–14, Note 19.

*B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937), 109–10. According to the author (107–8), Kollontai also served as an intermediary delivering German money to Lenin. Despite overwhelming evidence of German subsidies to Lenin from German sources, some scholars still find the notion unacceptable. Among them is as well-informed a specialist as Boris Souvarine: see his article in Est & Ouest, No. 641 (June 1980), 1–5.

*In his memoirs Brusilov claims to have known even as he assumed supreme command that Russian troops had no fighting spirit left in them and that the offensive would fail: A. B. Brusilov, Moi vospominaniia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), 216.